Regularization of vertical derivatives of potential field data using Morozov's discrepancy principle

Abstract The calculation of the vertical derivatives of potential field methods can be carried out in a stable manner by Tikhonov regularization, but this procedure requires the appropriate selection of a regularization parameter. For this purpose, we introduce a criterion based on Morozov's discrepancy principle that uses a preliminary approximation given by the vertical derivative of the smoothed data. The smoothing may be performed by a physical or a mathematically based low‐pass filter. The filtered data are computed only for estimating the regularization parameter; once it is found, we evaluate the regularized vertical derivative from the original data (not from the smoothed one) in the frequency domain. We verified from experiments with noise‐corrupted synthetic data, as well as gravity and magnetic field data, that the regularized vertical derivative has about the same smoothness as the one obtained from filtered data, but true anomalies are more easily distinguished from noise and the shapes of the anomalies are better preserved.